Psychotherapist Adam Phillips muses on our 'unlived' lives in his new book. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Observer

Back in 1890, when the "science of mind" was fresh and new, it captured the imagination of a vast range of thinkers: philosophers, alienists, neurologists, psychologists, as well as the new human or social scientists. The great William James, who named the field and was the first to talk of the "stream of consciousness" of subjective life, also noted in his Principles of Psychology: "Perhaps the greatest breach in nature is the breach from one mind to another."

The passage of 120 years has done little to help us leap that breach or to make the subjective life transparent. But in the wake of a period of rampant individualism, with its noisy excess of desiring, getting, and spending, the scientists of mind, in all their initial broad range, are once more trying. They want to assert that "selfishness" is not what humans are about in genes or teams, and that happiness needs redefinition. Attempting to explain us better to ourselves, they remind us that without other minds, there wouldn't be what only seem to be our own in the first place.

Adam Phillips, that master of paradox and the quotable sentence, is also one of very few British psychoanalyst-philosophers. In Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (Hamish Hamilton £20), he muses on our unlived lives, the ones that shadow us with their lost delights, and wonders whether frustrations may not make us better able to live our pleasures than do seeming satisfactions. Greed, he notes in a parenthesis, is "despair about pleasure".

In The Shrink and the Sage (Icon £9.99) philosopher Julian Baggini and his partner, psychotherapist Antonia Macaro recombine two fields that had grown distant to ponder what might make the good life and breach gaps. Aristotle's "mean" sets the tone. Meanwhile Oliver Burkeman, in The Antidote(Canongate £15), steers us away from the tacky horrors of positive thinking. After a bout of George Bush at the raucous Get Motivated! Seminar in Texas, he travels through the hidden benefits of insecurity to the museum of failure, finally to embrace mortality in Mexico. Somewhere along the way I like to imagine he bumped into Susan Cain, whose Quiet (Viking £14.99) sings the power and delights of introversion in a raucous world.

In Together (Allen Lane £25), the second book in his homo faber trilogy, the ever-rewarding Richard Sennett digs into history and examines the cooperative skills we humans possess. In groups or tribal collectivities, solidarity that insists on everyone's being in agreement won't provide the necessary glue. Sennett wants both to allow complex differences and engender cooperation through a craft of togetherness that includes listening, working and ritual gatherings.

The American trend for long books filled with mountains of data in support of provocative hypotheses continues. Steven Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature(Penguin £12.99), energetically argues that we've grown more civilised and less violent than our prehistoric, certainly pre-Hobbesian, forebears – something I've long wanted to believe but found it hard to while rockets, bombers and drones do their worst.

Jonathan Haidt is another Darwinian, this time a social and cultural psychologist, whose interests in The Righteous Mind (Allen Lane £20) are political, as well. Digging for the genesis and workings of morality in humans, he turns in this adventurous book to tribal life and animal behaviour, as well as the ancients and American politics. The rider on the elephant is his metaphor for the divided human mind, the first being our strategic reasoning; the much larger second all the other mental processes "outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behaviour". It's odd that American psychologists seem to have forgotten that Freud too read Darwin, and so keep having to reinvent the unconscious. Our morality comes from the elephant, is instinctive and tribal, binds and blinds, and easily turns into the moralising that ever makes us "righter" than them. Is it possible to get Democrats and Republicans to breach the gap? I wasn't convinced, but maybe Haidt and Sennett should get together.

In the fascinating Beyond Human Nature (Allen Lane £22), Jesse J Prinz shows how on most of the points on which evolutionary psychologists like to reflect, humans are shaped far more by their culture than by nature. Examining knowledge, language, thinking, feeling and values, Prinz shows that people from different cultures perceive differently, are driven to, and suffer, mental illness in various ways, and find a wide range of mating partners attractive, until globalised values arrive to standardise taste.

And so to love and mating, perhaps the best way to bridge the great gap of separate minds, let alone bodies. If you prefer your wooing with data – on hunter gatherers, voles and the neurohormone oxytocin – then Robin Dunbar's The Science of Love and Betrayal(Faber £12.99) is for you. Alternately, if you want the complexities of love in a family story that comes in bold graphic form and contains a host of psy-knowledge and Winnicottian lore, then Alison Bechdel's comic drama Are You My Mother?(Jonathan Cape £16.99) is pure bliss.

THE BOY KINGS OF TEXAS: A MemoirBy Domingo Martinez (Lyons)Recounting the author’s tough upbringing in Brownsville, Tex., this finalist for the National Book Award joins a rich body of Mexican American coming-of-age narratives. — Valerie Sayers

THE SOCIAL CONQUEST OF EARTHBy Edward O. Wilson (Liveright)This renowned scientist unflinchingly defines the human condition as largely a product of the tension between the impulse to selfishness and to altruism, individual selection vs. group dynamic. — Colin Woodard

The 14 stories of this Pulitzer Prize in poetry finalist’s (for Inseminating the Elephant) debut collection, set in the Pacific Northwest, display the poet’s emotional economy alongside raw honesty, haunting understatement, and a sharp wit. Women, damaged and vulnerable, make bad choices again and again, pursue fruitless obsessions, and somehow often come out on top.

Analyzing our "estrangement from nature" in the 20th century, Challenger's moving and lyrical first nonfiction book medi-tates on big picture questions as she travels from a writer's solitary cabin on England's Ding Dong Moor to Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey, back to the North Yorkshire town of Whitby and on to the tundra of the Arctic.

DEAR LIFE: Stories. By Alice Munro. (Knopf, $26.95.) This volume offers further proof of Munro’s mastery, and shows her striking out in the direction of a new, late style that sums up her whole career.

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING. By Dave Eggers. (McSweeney’s, $25.) Eg­gers’s novel is a haunting and supremely readable parable of America in the global economy, a nostalgic lament for a time when life had stakes and people worked with their hands.

WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL?By Jeanette Winterson. (Grove, $25.) Winterson’s unconventional and winning memoir wrings humor from adversity as it describes her upbringing by a wildly deranged mother.

It's awards season in the book world, with the National Book Awards in November and The Nobel Prize in Literature announcement. We figured now was as good a time as any to reflect on the books we've read this year (and as book editors, we've read a lot!), and determine which, in our opinion, are the best.

This fall was a monumental season for books, with the releases of Michael Chabon's long-awaited "Telegraph Avenue," Zadie Smith's enigmatic "NW," and J.K. Rowling's first foray into adult realism, "The Casual Vacancy." But somehow, the big-name releases underwhelmed us.

Instead, we were enchanted by writers who took risks: Davy Rothbart's big-hearted memoir moved us, Sheila Heti's intimate and peculiar story reached out to us, and Gillian Flynn's genre-bending thriller kept us up at night. Sure, there are a few stalwarts we'll never grow tired of--how can anyone resist Junot Díaz's sharp tongue, Marilynne Robinson's tender poignancy and Jonathan Franzen's cynicism?--but, for 2012 at least, we applaud the authors, both debut and more seasoned, who strayed from conventions.

Without further ado, here are the Huffington Post Books Editors' picks for the best books of 2012 (so far): follow the little blue link

Julian Baggini, Author

Tony Wright's Doing Politics
(Biteback £12.99) restores hope that serious thought can go on in
Westminster. Wright retired as an MP at the last election universally
respected by constituents and peers, and this collection of his writings
shows how an astute reading of the intellectual traditions of the left
provides all that is needed for a relevant, contemporary Labour party.
Roger Scruton continued to do the same job for the Conservatives, more
or less single-handed, in Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet (Atlantic £22).

Mary Beard, Classicist, author and broadcaster

Some of my favourite books of the year always turn out to be
exhibition catalogues. In 2012 my first prize went to the Royal
Academy's Johan Zoffany RA, Society Observed
(Royal Academy £24.95), edited by Martin Postle. It was a wonderful
souvenir of a great show, but also taught me a lot about an artist I
fancied I knew quite well – some of it surprisingly raunchy (like the
discussion of Zoffany's wonderful hanging condoms). In second place was
the British Museum's beautiful Shakespeare: Staging the World (British Museum £25), by Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton. You never knew that Henry V's saddle could be so interesting! Honest.

Owen Jones, Author and political commentator

As well as inflicting misery on millions, Tory governments tend to
provoke a new generation of left-wing writers. With what is both a
compelling and definitive guide to the rise of the BNP in the 00s, Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right (Verso £14.99), Daniel Trilling emerges at the forefront of a new wave of young progressive thinkers.

Sara Wheeler, Travel writer and biographer

A first book by a young Englishwoman impressed me. Suzanne Joinson's A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar
(Bloomsbury £12.99) consists of two parallel stories, each told from
the point of view of a childless female protagonist, one at a
shimmering, multi-ethnic Silk Road trading post, the other in
contemporary London. From a debutante to a grande dame: Alice Munro's Dear Life (Chatto & Windus £18.99), another dazzling collection of short stories, provincial and universal in equal measure.

Andrew Rawnsley, Chief political commentator, the Observer

I hugely enjoyed Dan Jones on The Plantagenets
(HarperPress £25), stonking narrrative history told with pace, wit and
scholarship about the bloody dynasty that produced some of England's
most brilliant, brutal kings. I thought even my large appetite for
accounts of the great conflict of the 20th century might have been sated
after so many excellent recent books on the subject, but Antony Beevor
proved me wrong with his terrific The Second World War
(W&N £25). As we have come to expect from this master, he excels at
using eyewitness testimony to illustrate how mankind can be capable of
both terrible cruelty and astonishing courage.

Maria Popova, Editor of brainpickings.org

As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1964-1980
(Hamish Hamilton £18.99), the second volume of Susan Sontag's published
diaries, presents a remarkable glimpse of the inner life – conflicted,
restless, brimming with conviction – of one of modern history's greatest
intellectuals. In Ignorance: How it Drives Science(Oxford
£14.99), Columbia biologist Stuart Firestein challenges our
relationship with facts and knowledge, making a bold case for new models
of science education and research funding rewarding curiosity rather
than certitude. Drawing from the City
(Tara £22.99) features the stunning illustrations of self-taught Indian
folk artist Teju Behan in a tender and aspirational story about woman's
empowerment in patriarchal society.

Robert McCrum, Associate editor, the Observer

My big discovery this year was Alison Moore's The Lighthouse
(Salt £8.99), a beautifully constructed first novel of haunting
subtlety and dark mystery. Shortlisted for the Booker prize, it was
probably too slight to be a contender, but Alison Moore must be a name
to watch. Salley Vickers is a novelist whose imaginative journey always
promises magic and mystery. The Cleaner of Chartres (Viking £16.99) shows her on top form in a rich weave of loss and redemption spiked with Ms Vickers' irrepressible wit.